Marxists’ Internet Archive

Victor Serge

1890–1947

“It is often said that
‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its
beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also
contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived
through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious
socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by
the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and
which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that
very sensible?” – From Lenin to
Stalin, 1937.

Victor Lvovich Khibalchich (better
known as Victor Serge) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian
Narodnik exiles. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Russian
Communist Party on arriving in Petrograd in February 1919 and worked
for the newly founded Communist International as a journalist, editor
and translator. As a Comintern representative in Germany he helped
prepare the aborted insurrection in the autumn of 1923.

In 1923 he also joined the Left
Opposition. He was expelled from the party in 1928 and briefly
imprisoned. At this time he turned to writing fiction, which was
published mainly in France. In 1933 he was arrested and exiled. After
an international campaign he was eventually deported from Russia in
April 1936 on the eve of the Moscow Show Trials.

Upon arrival in the West he renewed
contact with Trotsky but political differences developed and a bitter
controversy developed between the two remaining veterans of the
pre-Stalinist Russian Communist Party. Escaping from Paris in 1940 just
ahead of the invading Nazi troops he found refuge in Mexico. During his
last years Serge lived in isolation and died penniless shortly after
the 30th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1947.

Appendix

The document below was not written
by Victor Serge, but was ascribed to him by Trotsky in his polemic
against Serge in the essay Moralists and Sychpohants Against
Marxism. The text was included in a promotional
leaflet for Trotsky’s book Their
Morals and Ours, which Serge had translated
into French. In his book The Serge-Trotsky Papers,
David Cotterill points to suspicions that it may actually have been
written by or under the influence of Marc Zborowski (known as Comrade
Etienne), who was effectively running the Fourth International in Paris
at that time, but was in reality an agent of the NKVD. Whatever the
case may be, this document effectively destroyed the relationship
between the last two surviving members of the Russian Left Opposition
of the 1920s. For this reason we include it here in this archive.